1998: OUT OF THE DUST by Karen Hesse
1998: OUT OF THE DUST by Karen Hesse
As summer wheat came ripe, so did I,/born at home, on the kitchen floor.
“From pure sensation to the intuition of beauty, from pleasure and pain to love and the mystical ecstasy and death — all the things that are fundamental, all the things that, to the human spirit, are most profoundly significant, can only be experienced, not expressed. The rest is always and everywhere silence. After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.”
-Aldous Huxley
1998 medalist Out Of The Dust contains an accidental death so visceral and gruesome that it stands out even among the long list of visceral and gruesome accidental deaths that saturate the Newbery roster. I've seen a lot of literary deaths while working on this project, and this is maybe the first one that's made me legitimately upset (the bear trap in Kira-Kira was pretty bad but that doesn't count as a death, and my complaint about that scene is equal parts its gruesomeness and its lack of service to the story). I won't even describe it here but just know that after reading a book about a child prison or a faulty rope swing or a baroque bus accident or a plague or a plague or a plague, this death is worse.
Part of what made it worse is likely that I completely forgot about the death; the last time I read Out Of The Dust, I was in grade school. But even though I didn't remember much of the novel, I definitely remembered Karen Hesse, the queen of “horrible things happening to her characters”. I had a vague memory of another novel of hers, Phoenix Rising, dealing with a nuclear power plant meltdown in Vermont and the protagonist’s family having to take in boarders dying of radiation poisoning. In terms of people who deliver bleakness and misery in the classic children’s novels of the 1990s, you can't really top Karen Hesse. Adding to the bleakness is Hesse's decision to write the novel entirely in stripped-down blank verse:
“I never attempted to write this book any other way than in free verse. The frugality of the life, the hypnotically hard work of farming, the grimness of conditions during the Dust Bowl, demanded an economy of words.”
“Hypnotic” and “hard” and “grim” all definitely come across in the book that starts with a baby being born on a dust-caked kitchen floor. I know this is going to look like the dumbest sentence I've ever written, but: I did not realize how much literal dust there was in the Dust Bowl. Even when there wasn't a dust storm that could just kill you if you were outside at the wrong time, even when dust couldn't pile so high on your roof that your home could collapse, dust was blowing into your home constantly. You slept with a wet washcloth over your face and all of your food was gray; Hesse makes another visceral reference partway through the novel of “having to chew your milk”. The book is a fast read but one of the more emotionally draining ones in the Newbery catalog.
But, at least in Out Of The Dust, Hesse is coming by her story, including that horrifying accident, honestly; she wasn't just guessing “okay, Oklahama panhandle during the Dust Bowl, that was probably miserable, probably going to be a pregnant mom throwing a bucket of water around except it's not water it's actually kerosene because the mom wasn't paying attention and now there's a giant pillar of fire and now the daughter knocks the bucket over again and just sets her pregnant's mom body fully on fire condemning her to a brutal painful death and also the daughter's hands catch on fire and painfully scar her hands and that's a separate layer of tragedy because the daughter thinks her ticket out of town is going to be going pro as a piano player” - ah crap, guess I am going to tell you what happens in the book - that is, apparently, a version of something that actually happened. Hesse spent months poring over microfilm of the long-defunct 1930s newspaper Boise City News. Why write a book where something so miserable happens? As Hesse put it in her Newbery acceptance speech:
“Readers ask, could such a terrible mistake really happen? Yes. It happened often. I based the accident on a series of articles appearing in the 1934 Boise City News. That particular family tragedy planted the seed for Out of the Dust, as much as the dust storms did. Let me tell you. I never make up any of the bad things that happen to my characters. I love my characters too much to hurt them deliberately, even the prickly ones. It just so happens that in life, there’s pain; sorrow lives in the shadow of joy, joy in the shadow of sorrow. The question is, do we let the pain reign triumphant, or do we find a way to grow, to transform, and ultimately transcend our pain?”
And that's a large part of what Out Of The Dust is about: finding a way to transcend an unbelievably bleak period in your life. Because Hesse did not just find horrifying accidents in the old microfilms:
“The dust storms were only minor articles— what was going on there was life! There were concerts and plays and schools.… So I made Billie Jo connected to the arts, because I wanted the reader to understand that even if people were struggling under such harsh circumstances, they would find a way to keep joy in their lives.”
And that’s what makes Billie Jo’s life bearable. She plays the piano.
I started taking piano lessons when I was seven and stopped when I was sixteen. Everyone who ever took piano lessons says they never should have stopped, and I’m also saying that, and it’s always correct. I never should have stopped, I could have gotten so much better. In grade school, my favorite things to play were Vince Guaraldi’s pieces that he wrote for the Charlie Brown television specials, and I’d play “Linus and Lucy” for my classmates in grade school music class and they’d love it. When I got older and became an emo high school kid, and as my lessons pivoted more towards classical training, I had a lot of fun mostly learning and playing Chopin, the second most emo composer in the Western canon, behind Schubert and ahead of Beethoven. In high school I started playing with the praise band that sang at my Catholic school’s Masses, so I ended up getting more into rock music, learning how to mix and match different parts of songs, and read off of a lead sheet or hastily scribbled chord changes instead of a full score, how to sing at the same time, how to yell at other singers and musicians to make the music sound the way I wanted. In college, I was the music director for a Catholic fellowship group, and ran my praise band like JK Whiplash in the movie Whiplash. When I graduated from college, the main thing I wanted for a graduation gift was a keyboard that I could take with me to my new apartment, so I could keep playing in my apartment, by myself, because in every previous period of my life, in every setting, playing music was comforting and cathartic and moving. I could not imagine my life without having a way to play music whenever I wanted, and I never got good at guitar, so keyboard it was. And it’s still with me, in the house I now share with my wife and two daughters.
I wrote, in an earlier essay, about rocking out with my oldest daughter, playing “Get Back” on the keys for her while she sang along. It’s still one of my absolute favorite memories of her early years, because you can see how much she enjoys it - and how good she is! She like gets the rhythm down exactly! She’s three! - and I want her to get the same joy from singing and playing and hearing music that I have had in my life for years.
I come by this honestly, just so you know. Both of my maternal grandparents were lifelong public school music teachers. When my daughters talk to their great-grandmother on a Google Meet video call, my great-grandmother tries to teach them how two eighth notes make a quarter note. She’s just trying to teach them the basics of theory and materials right out of the gate. My oldest kind of gets it. My youngest can’t count past ten yet, so I’m going to give her more time.
The songs I like to play and sing to myself, when my wife is taking the kids to dance lessons and I am alone in my house are just whatever songs I usually listen to on my phone that make me feel less stressed. “Hope” by Vampire Weekend. “I’ve Got Me” by Joanna Sternberg. “Not” by Big Thief. “Wild Sage” by the Mountain Goats. “Fake Your Death” by My Chemical Romance. When I have a lot of time, I will attempt to pick through a Debussy prelude, and will do an incredibly bad job, but will still find some comfort in how pretty it could have sounded. When my daughters are in the house, they mostly like to hear “How Far I’ll Go” from Moana, which is pretty good too, and the favorite piece that both of them like to hear me play is, believe it or not, “Linus and Lucy”.
Last week, during dinner, my daughter asked me to get a piece of piano music and tell her what all of the symbols mean. That was a pretty broad request, but I grabbed Linus and Lucy - the piece that was open on my piano because it’s the one both of my daughters request the most - and tried to talk my way through some of the simpler stuff. This is where the tempo is written down, this is where the dynamics are. There are clefs and key signatures and time signatures, but we don’t need to go into too much detail right now. These are the notes your left hand plays, these are the notes your right hand plays. Obviously, there’s a lot we didn’t go into - we were at the dinner table and I maybe could have shown her more at the piano, but ultimately I’m not the best guy to explain this stuff and even if I was it’s not exactly easy for people to explain - but she kept asking questions, she kept wanting to know more, it might be time for her to start lessons, even earlier than I did. In a world that is drying up, we must find a way to keep joy in our lives anyways.
Newburied is a series by Tony Ginocchio on the history of the Newbery Medal and a whole bunch of other stuff related to it. You can subscribe via Substack to get future installments sent to your inbox directly. The next installment will cover the 1922 medalist, The Story of Mankind by Hendrik Willem Van Loon.